One of the greatest dis-satisfiers for health care providers is the amount of time they are spending interacting with their EMR. Filling out details several times, limited accessibility and a lack of configurability… Both patients and professionals express their frustration, and at times it seems as if the only thing worse than using an EMR is updating it. How can we address these very real and reasonable concerns? The answer does not lie in going back to paper records but rather in making technology work for patients and providers rather than having the patients and providers work for the EMR!

Patient and Provider Friendly IT

As Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) become increasingly important in the evaluation of therapeutic alternatives the need for more patient/provider friendly IT support increases. From the patients’ perspective the ease with which they can provide outcomes to their providers will be critical. From the providers’ perspective it will be the ease with which they can use IT to submit the required data to CMS and other payers. Is it an unrealistic expectation that we will have access to such IT in the future? Obviously not, since many IT companies in the health care space are working to provide such support.

VitalHealth Software’s eHealth solutions are particularly well-suited to meet these needs. VitalHealth provides cloud-based solutions to ensure that both patients and providers can have access to PROs whenever and wherever they have internet connectivity. The VitalHealth solutions automatically configure to the mobile device most preferred by patient and provider.

How do these solutions address the patients’ frustrations regarding answering the same question multiple times and the providers’ frustration of feeling like they are working for the EMR rather than the other way around?

The easily configurable, rules enabled solutions which VitalHealth has developed to support PROs ensure that information previously provided by patients is available for subsequent surveys, thus eliminating the need for redundant patient data entry. These solutions are also configurable so that only relevant survey questions are presented to the patient. No more frustrating “If your answer to question 3 was no, then skip to question 10” directions. In addition, educational materials can be automatically sent to the patient based upon their responses to survey questions and their clinical diagnosis. Interfacing VitalHealth’s solutions with the base EMR allows for documentation of the delivery of appropriate educational material and time spent counseling patients with multiple chronic conditions.

VitalHealth’s solutions help the provider by automating the assignment of individual care plans which include both obtaining diagnosis specific PROs and the delivery of rules based alerts to the care team should the patient ‘fall off’ the anticipated care pathway. VitalHealth’s solutions have been documented in the literature to both help providers save time for each patient visit and to improve the completeness of appropriate follow-up for patients. Thus the solutions improve both efficiency and effectiveness of the patient-physician interactions.

Automating these tasks doesn’t lead to less patient-provider interaction. It leads to more appropriate patient-provider interactions. In the world of bundled payments and advanced alternative payment models it is critical that health care systems improve the efficiency and effectiveness of how they deliver care. VitalHealth Software is eager to help health care systems realize these goals.

Learn more about our solutions at HIMSS 2017! Visit us at booth #5790.